By the way, even if you fully plan to vote for Biden in November (because Trump would be worse and has declared that if elected he would ban Palestinians from entering the US x, x, x, x)...
You can and I would argue should call or email Biden or whatever other Democrats represent you and just straight up lie about it. Tell them "I'm a constituent, and I've voted for you in x number of elections, and thanks to your support for the genocide of the Palestinian people, I will never, ever vote for you again."
Politicians, Democrats, and especially Biden need a fire lit under their asses, because the vast majority of them clearly aren't going to do shit without one. Or, worse, be like Biden and actively be the reason that Israel can continue its genocide on a political, monetary, and military level.
Tell Biden and other politicians that you will never vote for them again. It doesn't matter if it's true. It will help pressure US politicians to stop this genocide, and therefore it's the right thing to do.
Obviously this also applies to other countries where politicians are supporting Israel's genocide, especially countries that have cut funding to UNRWA (list here).
An oppressive silence hangs over the room. Something isn't quite right; Felix can't seem to focus on anything, no matter how much he tries. The night light he uses isn't on, for some reason, but in spite of the darkness he doesn't have to strain to see. He shouldn't be able to see much of anything, but he does.
They drift through the wall and Felix immediately knows they're upset. The feeling radiates off of them in a way that feels suffocating. Felix tries to sit up, but his body seems to be pinned in place by something. The amalgam of spirits approach with a gradual, inevitable pace, and then they lean over his prone form, gripping his arms hard enough to make him wince.
That shouldn't be possible either. His bracelet with the enchantment on it that allows him to interact with ghosts is still on his nightstand where he left it... isn't it?
He feels far too many sets of eyes boring into him in a way that makes him want to crawl in a hole. Leaning closer still, their head moves further downward until their lips graze his ear, and he hears a voice speak with a degree of clarity he has never once experienced from them: "You're running out of time."
Their grip is suddenly on Felix's neck, and he tries to cry out but he's unable to make any sound at all. Their face twists in a mask of rage with inhuman distortion and terror seizes Felix in a way he's not sure he's ever felt before.
His eyes snap open. The room is there as it should be, with the night light in the nearest outlet. The bracelet is on his nightstand. His heart is going a mile a minute, and his skin clammy.
They watch from a few feet away, more placid than the version of them from the dream.
Felix swallows heavily. A nightmare is only a nightmare, no matter how vivid it is in the moment.
Ava perches atop a building in the city in the wires they've been gradually claiming on their own, legs dangling over the edge and hands braced on the ledge. Far beneath them thousands of digital lives go about their business. Sprites, programs, viruses -- fewer of them, but not zero -- antiviruses, every kind of digital life imaginable, some gameless, some sneaking around on some business during the hours their players are absent.
In many ways, it operates much like a city on the other side of the screen would, with its own peculiarities. Circuiton has an unusually high proportion of sprite-driven crime, and is more hostile than many cities of its size towards viruses -- which makes Ava's choice as an infected bot to target it with their schemes a challenging prospect.
The city is active at all hours, and has a thriving nightlife, so below them a good number of the mostly sprites coming and going are clad in club-appropriate clothing, one group laughing loud enough it's a fair bet they've already more than started on drinking for the night.
At the moment, though, Ava's sight catches none of it. The rogue looks visibly exhausted, their eyes unfocused. Their thoughts are elsewhere, spinning constantly around memories that make their heart sink until their entire chest fills with a throbbing ache.
If their people who have been then since the beginning can leave, anyone can.
If one of the people who should have been safest for them to be around can try to kill them, they will never be safe.
If people who claim to love them can choose to leave them alone to deal with everything by themself and not involve them in the decision at all, they can't even count on anyone to be there when they need them.
A growing sense of despair threatens to swallow them, and they can't even find it in themself to scream. On the outside, they just look frozen.
"Dude... you alright?"
Ava snaps to attention, their eyes darting towards the light-coated Vulpera snapping her fingers in their face.
"What?"
"You were like... gone. I know you don't really talk about things but like... I don't know. Can I get you an energy drink or something?"
"I'm fine," Ava says tersely, eyes moving back to the streets below them.
"Whatever you say, man. Keep being weird," the second half is mumbled mostly to herself, and Laika's accent sounds a bit stronger as she does. "What do you think about the new ordinance, though? Do you think it's going to be a problem?"
Ava snorts derisively. "They're gonna have to find a way to enforce it. They can say whatever they want, but they can't do shit."
"Right... yeah."
"They're showing their hand so obviously now, though. I'm not sure if it's desperation, or they're setting bait."
"What do you mean?"
"I didn't have names to put to the thorns in my side until now. But now they're showing that at the least, they're buying out the council. And that's not gonna be so easy to hide."
Laika makes a quiet noise of understanding.
Ava stands up. "I need to think on the next move. You know what to do."
"Yeah... okay."
Ava vanishes from the space next to their fellow rogue, leaving her alone to survey the city until their next orders arrive.
[Sollux tries not to abuse his skills too frequently. He's perfectly aware that the amount he does abuse them is probably already far too much by normal standards, but with how little he has to do and how much time he has nothing but idleness to entertain him, he thinks he's been doing a pretty good job of not sending people self-destructive executables masked as jpegs and music files. He hasn't blown up a single husktop in the last two weeks! Cause for celebration, considering the company around here.]
[Even so, he's still not going to do that. He may be a spiteful goldblood with a grudge, but Sefoni had a point about provoking the bastard. As much as Sollux is willing to draw fire to keep the ire pointed at him, destroying that outlet would have Consequences with a capital C. It's not like there would be other suspects, and Eridan knowing that he had done something tangible to him from such a long distance -- destroying his things, exerting control over his behavior, disabling his avenues for communication. It's not the sort of thing Sollux gives a shit about, but it doesn't take much time to run through all the ways Eridan would manage to interpret the time-honored tradition of remotely blowing up someone's tech for being annoying.]
[It takes much more processing power to run through all of the potential ways he would hurt someone if he felt physically threatened.]
[Sollux weaves his mind through the established connection -- from IP, to husktop, to the wireless connection -- through Eridan's network, touching the vast, yawning sea of the contained internet in that universe. Hardware information, make, model, software. He would yawn if he could, breezing through cute little firewalls and procuring software that isn't live yet. He forces it to download as a background process while Eridan is distracted correcting typos in his weird stalker erotica and sexually harassing Karkat, setting it to autorun on completion.]
[Sollux backs up that nasty little document file a split second before his program runs, then neatly retracts his spindly little meddling fingers, leaving no trace of his interference behind.]
[Sorry, Eridan. Seems you're scheduled for a system update. Maybe take a nap in the meantime.]
[A series of images is posted, all of them featuring Nilys in various stages of undress.
There's a picture of them in a maid dress with an egregiously low cut top and a skirt that barely leaves them decent, and then various sets of lingerie that cling to their thick curves. A few sets are so sheer that they might as well not be wearing anything, and Nilys is beaming without a single ounce of shame about their exposure.]
With Kuprum leaving for exile, you abscond with your custodian before the demolition drones have a chance to find you hiding in what was supposed to be an empty comb. Even if you weren't so sick, there's no way you'd be able to take your synth modulator with you, so that stays behind. You don't let yourself feel upset about it. You can only take what's light enough to fit in your shitty fetch modus, which means your palmhusk and headphones, one of Kuprum's shitty plastic figures, his credits voucher(stolen) that will be deactivated before he even leaves the surface, the blanket you've spent the last two perigees wrapped in, and a handful of junk you cram in on your way out.
Your custodian isn't used to being let out for walks, but she can see and you don't have a destination in mind so you let her take the lead. You have to assume she's picked up some kind of scent with how she starts scuttling forward with determination and no input from you.
You move at dawn before the warming air has you pulling her into an unlocked storm shelter. The hivebatch has been getting thinner and thinner, and even the convenience hive inside the hivestem you once lived in has been closed for more than a wipe after the last greenblood clerk went off planet. You worry more about drones than you do any bloodthirsty troll finding you nowadays.
When the air starts to cool you're out again, feeling the heat of the dying rays of sunlight through your clothes as your custodian ferries you through the maze of hiveclusters. You pass through the dump where you met Marsti, and later Charun, the same lot you and your moirail spent two wipes living out of before he came of age to enroll in helmstraining. It's nothing but a big pit now, heaps of trash vaporised and ready for shattered chunks of hivecluster to be shovelled over.
Your custodian grazes on dead lawnring while you fumble with the buttons of a meal dispenser you identified by the pulses of electricity you can feel running through it. The voucher you stole isn't working, and you can hear the machine beep out a jingle you associate with any piece of malfunctioning technology alerting you to an imminent drone strike. Kuprum would have fried the machine and peeled it open to get you whatever was inside like a fresh crustacean, but you hardly have the strength to scowl before urging your custodian to move on again. Your bilesac hurts too much to eat anything anyway.
The longer she scuttles along, the less you feel the pulses of psionic energy in your field. You must be heading out of the stemcluster entirely. You stop corralling her into hidden places, letting her get you out of the sunlight while you keep yourself quiet, enduring the pain in your head, your joints, your eyes, and all of your organs as they, you assume, start to shut down. The hours slip by. You sleep a lot.
When she finally slows, then stops to wander, you realize where she's taken you. It's the last place you got out of the hive to take her by yourself, when Kuprum was busy with training and your least favourite hatefriend was still alive and planetbound enough to whine about missing his field.
Fozzer Velyes' Pit Park. A cull field. An endless series of hexagonal holes in the ground, some covered over with dirt that house the corpses of trolls he couldn't just leave alone. You let out a breath that, perigees ago, would have been a laugh, but now only brings on several minutes of painful dryheaving. She brought you to a cullpit, to join the trolls already underground.
Your custodian wasn't the type to abandon her charge for dead. She'd only gotten clingier as the smell of death you gave off grew heavier, and now she had her antennae practically glued to your back as you slid down hers and onto the rocky ground.
Your landing is rough. Pain shoots through your joints, and you spend a while on the ground catching your breath while she clicks and buzzes.
Was this were you finally withered away? Fozzer had left you no shortage of pits to choose from. You never considered yourself to be someone who would ever give up on your life, fighting fang and frond against it and every troll that got in your way, but everything just hurt so badly, and you were so tired, and you were so hungry, and you were so angry. You remembered the names of every troll who'd ever seemed sympathetic to your state of being, every troll who seemed like they wanted to do something about the way the planet was structured, and who one by one boxed up their ideals to turn themselves into another soldier for the empress.
They were all worthless wrigglers too scared to put their caegars where their ignorance gashes were when their numbers were called, but, you think, by abandoning you, they were going to live.
And you.
Were going.
To die.
You don't realize you're falling until it's too late. Your walkstub shifts in some loose gravel and you're tumbling nug over fronds into the empty pit fate picked out for you.
You hurt. You gasp. You do not get up.
Your custodian hisses from the surface, and you reach for your palmhusk.
